Editor’s Note: The following report is excerpted from Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin, the premium online newsletter published by the founder of WND. Subscriptions are $99 a year or, for monthly trials, just $9.95 per month for credit card users, and provide instant access for the complete reports.
 Buckingham Palace in London |
A British intelligence report says al-Qaida is trying to recruit disaffected nuclear scientists from Russia and Pakistan, according to Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.
The report from the British intelligence agency MI6 comes as part of an alert that has been issued in preparation for the G20 meetings to be held in London over the next few days.
Al-Qaida has “access to nuclear materials from the former Soviet Union. In the past 10 years there have been 1,300 separate incidents of nuclear material smuggling,” MI6 revealed.
The British Home Office also announced it will train 10,000 of Britain’s police to deal with the aftermath of a chemical or biological attack.
Porton Down, Britain’s chemical-biological warfare center, will oversee the training at its high-security establishment on Salisbury Plain.
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“The ideology associated with al-Qaida will outlive changes to its structure,” the report said, adding, “Terrorist organizations will have access to new technology and may become capable of conducting more lethal operations.”
The current threat level remains at “severe” – only one step from the highest level – and the report said, “We know that some British citizens still travel abroad to be trained in how to commit terrorist attacks, that terrorists want to strike against the UK again and that they will keep on trying.”
In order to counter the threat, the government plans to spend billions of British pounds a year on counter-terrorism by 2011, which goes beyond police and the security services to the 60,000 “store, pub and club managers who all work in crowded places that might be targeted by terrorists.
“We have provided security advice to sport venues and shopping centers and expanded protective programs for air, sea and rail travel to provide proportionate, sustainable and efficient security for passengers and staff,” the report said.
Spending on the prevention of extremism abroad is to triple to more than 130 million British pounds by next year. The report says the aim is to “challenge perceptions overseas of life as a British Muslim in the UK.”
The approach includes setting up an English language center at al-Azhar University in Cairo.
The government is also running programs in prisons, schools and universities across North Africa and South Asia, including 700 in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, MI5 officials have joined with MI6 leaders in putting all available officers, as well as Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorist squad members, on “red alert” to try to prevent any attack at the coming G20 summit, when 20 of the world’s leaders will be in London.
Officials say upwards of $50 million is being spent to turn the city and its airports into a fortress. The fear no longer is a car bomb but a list of targets that never before have been identified as under threat.
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